


The Lair of the Elder Gay

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Myth-taken [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Eldritch Abomination Angels, Gen, Original Queer Characters - Freeform, POV Outsider, Queer Themes, gratuitous dungeons and dragons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21529195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Members of a D&D group speculate about the nature of a strange bookseller while trying to navigate coursework, finals, and relationships.
Series: Myth-taken [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1559953
Comments: 135
Kudos: 902
Collections: After the Nightingale Sang (Soho's Cryptids), The Queerest Place in Soho, Wickedly Good Omens Fics





	The Lair of the Elder Gay

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Aziraphale speaking Polari is borrowed wholesale from ["it's the light (it's the obstacle that casts it)" by Handful_of_Silence.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18320123) Other ideas in this fic (such as the idea that Aziraphale hasn't bothered to change barber shops in more than a century) are taken from various tumblr posts that I can't locate.
> 
> There is some potential Islamophobic violence in this story, but it gets shut down quickly before anyone is hurt. There is also some brief mischaracterization of mental illness by a character who is desperately trying to think up an excuse for _how_ the Islamophobic violence was prevented.

“You will not believe,” Birch told the group, “what a weird day I’ve had.” They pulled out their character sheet and plunked themselves down at the café table, across from Ravi.

Ravi was busy laying out the materials for the session, so he didn’t respond for a moment. Paul, sitting right beside him, said the obvious. “Weird day?”

“Okay, so I’m working on my thesis, right. It’s about Polari, which is this thieves’ cant which became the working language of the gay community way back when—lost gay history plus linguistics, you know I’m all over that. So there are some sources I’d like to track down, and I’ve been all over London except for one place, and I go there, and—get this—it was  _ open.” _

Ravi gave him a look over the DM’s screen. “Okay . . . I’m missing context.”

“No, you don’t understand. This guy’s operating hours are absolutely legendary. Or maybe notorious. His shop has one star reviews across the board, I mean, you’ve never seen anything like it on a place that’s still in business. I was honestly a little frightened, it was like walking into the lion’s den. But I go in.”

“Then what?” Daisy said.

“Then I find out that ‘can I help you’ can rhyme with ‘fuck off or else,’ and I’m even more intimidated. This guy—I mean,  _ this guy. _ He looks like he time traveled here from the nineteenth century. He  _ sounds _ like Jane Austen. And I figure, I’m a nonbinary person with green hair and piercings looking for queer material, this is a conversation that’s doomed from the start. But hell, I’m there. So I explain my project, that I’m researching Polari, and the guy just lights up, and he starts  _ speaking Polari to me. _ Fluently. I mean, this—this is the human incarnation of drinking tea with your pinky sticking out. The idea that he’d know an underground language . . .” Birch waved their hands in the air inarticulately.

“So are you going to use him as a primary source?” Ravi asked.

“No. Absolutely not. He was  _ very _ firm on that point. But the next thing he does is, he takes me through the shelves—God alone knows if this man has any organizational system, I think he might just have every book’s location memorized—and finds me a book that he says is worth a thousand pounds, and tells me that I can read it and cite it so long as it doesn’t leave the shop and I take all precautions not to damage it. This, from someone who is  _ legendary _ for bad customer service. I think I sort of stumbled into the lair of an Elder Gay.” Birch dumped their dice out onto the table and had to grab for the eight-sider as it rolled towards the edge.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons in the café had become a somewhat-weekly event for all five of them—Ravi, Paul, Birch, Daisy, and Lorinda. It would disintegrate as they got close to finals time, and they all knew it, but for now, it was good to be together. The small talk moved on to other subjects, and eventually Ravi called them to order and started the adventure.

It wasn’t until the next week that the subject of Birch’s Elder Gay came up again. “Yeah,” he told Ravi, “I have to go early, I’m supposed to stop by Fell’s—”

Beside Ravi, Paul went ramrod straight.  _ “Fell’s?” _

“Yeah. You remember, the guy I told you about? Knows Polari, has books on queer history that will cost me a thousand pounds if I mess them up, but no pressure?”

“Yes,” Paul said, “but you didn’t say it was  _ Fell’s.” _

Birch looked at him closely. “Why’s this important?”

Paul took a deep breath. Then he said, “My dad owns a barber shop.”

“I know that,” Birch said, confused.

“Mr. Fell is one of our customers. You just—treat him with respect, all right?”

“Of course I will,” Birch said. “What’s this  _ about?” _

Paul shook his head. “It’s just that—when you called him an Elder Gay— _ you’re not wrong.” _

He wasn’t forthcoming about it until they got together drinking in Lorinda’s flat, which she had got with Daisy and two other people because the university was dragging its feet on changing her registration to female which meant that they kept trying to put her in a dorm room with the boys. The conversation had turned to whether Keanu Reeves really was immortal. “Immortals exist,” Paul said meditatively, staring up at the ceiling.

Ravi snuggled closer to him. “You’re an idiot, you know.”

“I’m your idiot.”

“You’re my idiot.”

“But I’m not wrong about this. Immortals exist.”

“Right. They go around with ananachro—achro—out of place katanas and murder each other ‘cause they’ve got lightning inside or something.”

Daisy tried to warble “Who Wants To Live Forever,” and found a number of pitches hitherto unknown by science.

“No,” Paul said, “they get haircuts.”

“What?”

“But sometimes you could  _ swear _ their hair hasn’t grown until they sit down in the chair.”

_ “What.” _

“Look, I don’t  _ know, _ all right? I get it from my dad. And my dad gets it from his dad. And what we get is that way back in eighteen eighty six, when the barber shop was established, its first customer was Mr. Fell.”

“People have kids,” Ravi pointed out.

“This bloke is as gay as a three biller—a three dollar—a flamingo,” Paul decided.

“Flamingos,” Daisy said, “aren’t gay.”

“They’re  _ pink.” _

“They have more flamingos. Flamingo chicks.”

“Maybe,” Paul said, “half of them are trans.”

It was the sort of philosophical problem better suited to cannabis than alcohol, and Ravi briefly wished he had some. “If there was a suspiss—a species,” he mused, “made of cis males and trans males, would the trans males actually be  _ trans, _ and if not, how would you know?” He didn’t think the question made much sense, but the one in his head was a complex structure concerning gender norms and what made them that way, and the alcohol had thoroughly Jenga-ed any coherence it might have once had.

Paul hiccuped. “I dunno. Ask Mr. Fell, maybe.”

“How would he know?”

“He’s got lots of books,” Birch volunteered.

“I think he knows stuff,” Paul said. “My dad thinks he knows stuff.”

“Like whether flamingos are trans?”

“There’s pink on the trans flag,” Lorinda pointed out.

Daisy started giggling. “We all,” she said between gales of laughter, “sound so stupid.”

Which they did.

The semester proceeded, with the tension slowly ratcheting as they approached various due dates. In the Dungeons and Dragons game, Birch’s paladin began a star-crossed romance with Paul’s warlock. Ravi tried to work out how he felt about that, and ran into an impossible tangle. On the one hand, Dungeons and Dragons was its own thing, it didn’t have anything to do with reality, Birch wasn’t really flirting with Paul and there was nothing to be jealous of. On the other hand, Birch really seemed to enjoy flirting with Paul. And on a third hand that had appeared from somewhere, Ravi would have happily dated Birch if he’d ever had the slightest indication that Paul wanted an open relationship, so who exactly was he jealous  _ of, _ in this scenario, Paul or Birch?

He tried to put it out of his mind.

Around April, he actually encountered Birch's Mr. Fell. The man came into the cafe for a slice of cake and greeted Birch in a dialect that was clearly  _ related _ to English, and clearly  _ related _ to Cockney, but wasn't either of those things. Nor did Ravi comprehend more than one word in three. The man sat down with his cake, and Ravi didn't  _ think _ he was eavesdropping on the Dungeons and Dragons game—but he wasn't completely sure.

“Was that Mr. Fell?” Daisy said, when the man left.

Paul nodded.

“He does look sort of—out of place,” Daisy said thoughtfully. “Maybe he’s a silver dragon. He looks sort of like a shapeshifted silver dragon.”

Lorinda gave her an odd look. “How do you figure?”

“The hair.”

“It’s just white.”

“It’s a different  _ kind _ of white.”

“With the reviews his bookshop gets,” Birch said, “he could as easily be a blue dragon who has just decided to be nice to  _ some _ people.”

Paul bristled. “He is  _ not,” _ he said, “he just—look, all dragons have hoards, right? Regardless of alignment.”

“Yeah, but there’s something fundamentally contrary about having a hoard and pretending like you want people to buy things from it and then doing everything you can to prevent people from buying things from it.”

“That’s not the same as  _ evil _ alignment, and you know it.”

“Crystal dragon?” Birch suggested. “That’s, what, lawful neutral?”

Ravi pinched the bridge of his nose. “Guys, you do know that all the mythology in Dungeons and Dragons is  _ made up.” _

“Well, yeah,” Daisy said, “but so is the idea of some guy living in Soho for two centuries.”

“No,” Paul said, “it  _ isn’t. _ Mr. Fell is real. Anyway, gem dragon of some sort . . . does sort of fit, actually, but the rule is, you  _ don’t speculate about it. _ It isn’t our business. Sometimes good things happen when he’s around, but you don’t draw attention to it and you don’t make a fuss, otherwise he might go away.”

“That actually sounds a little like one of the fey,” Lorinda said thoughtfully.

“Right,” Ravi said,  _ “slightly _ more grounded, some real mythology there, but still utter bollocks.”

“Well,” Paul asked him, “what do you think is going on?”

Ravi opened his mouth to say,  _ nothing, _ and then saw the perfect opportunity. He paused, and then said, “You might be on the right track, with the dragon thing. Only what sort of dragon hoards books rather than gold? I think you’d need to postulate an entire new kind of dragon, for that. Call it . . .” He paused dramatically. “A bookwyrm.”

Daisy threw a napkin at him.

Ravi was vaguely uncomfortable with speculating about a real person that way, but turning into a joke didn’t seem to stop it.  _ Gem dragon _ and  _ some kind of fey _ seemed to be the going theories. They didn’t usually talk about it at D&D, however, because Mr. Fell kept coming to the café.

It was the last D&D session before finals when the other shoe dropped.

Ravi and the rest were already in the cafe when the woman burst in. She was wearing a green hijab and a long green dress, and the man behind her seemed to object to the former. He grabbed her by the shoulder and bunched his fist in the scarf. "You,” he snarled, “can just go back where you—"

Then he  _ screamed. _ And let go of the scarf, and fell to his knees.

Ravi had never heard a person scream like that before, and if he hadn't been starting out of his seat to help the woman, he would have rocketed to his feet at the sound. The woman backed away and bumped into him as he came to help, and she came close to shrieking herself.

"It's okay," Ravi said, over the man's screaming. "It's okay." He wondered if it was. "Listen—"

“Come with us to the ladies,” Lorinda interrupted. “We’ll give you some breathing room to fix yourself up.”

The woman shot an intimidated glance at the two of them. Lorinda, Ravi thought, was six foot three and resembled nobody quite so much as a young Mahershala Ali, so people hassled her about her gender regularly. Daisy was five foot two, but she had a buzz cut. If the woman was going to be phobic—

“Thank you,” the woman said faintly, and fled with the other two.

Ravi let out a relieved breath, and then wondered what to do about the man. One of the baristas seemed to be calling the police.

If Ravi confronted him, the man might start on about foreigners again. With people like that, it never mattered that Ravi was born and bred in Liverpool and had the unmistakable accent to match. On the other hand, the man seemed well beyond that . . . “Hey. You.”

The man was scratching his  _ face. _

Ravi hesitated, and then grabbed the man’s wrists. “Listen, I think you’re a right arsehole, but—stop that, you’re hurting yourself.”

_ “Too many!!” _

It was the first coherent thing he had said since he started screaming, and it wasn’t very. “Too many what?”

_ “Eyes!!! Too many  _ fucking _ eyes!” _

From the table beside them, Mr. Fell made a huffy noise. “There really is no call for that sort of language.”

The man looked up, and, to Ravi’s shock, shut his mouth sharply.

Then he scrambled to his feet and bolted.

“Disagreeable individual,” Mr. Fell said, and dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

“Yeah,” Ravi said, a large number of things running through his head at once. “Not a nice guy.” He moved slowly back toward their table.

Paul caught his eye and gave him an intense look, as if he were trying to beam warning at Ravi. Ravi thought he already knew what about. The evidence added up to  _ Mr. Fell just did that. _

Did  _ what, _ that was the question. Some sort of psychic attack, that could be it, but what really shook Ravi was the possibility that the man had seen  _ what Mr. Fell really looked like, _ and it had done  _ that _ to him.

Ravi had a passionate hatred for the most apropos writer, which was a pity, because most role-playing games ended up doing Lovecraft pastiche at one point or another.

He sat back down at the table and arranged his dice into a very precise line.

Daisy and Lorinda emerged from the ladies’ room at about that time, with the woman who had been attacked. “Guys, this is Saida,” Lorinda announced.

Birch pulled a chair over to the table. “You want some tea? I’ll order you some tea. Settle your nerves.”

“I—I—yes. Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.” She spoke English with the accented precision of someone who had learned it in a classroom, and Ravi decided to speak more Received Pronunciation than usual just in case that made it easier for her to follow.

Ravi was finding it difficult not to be hyper-aware of the tiny clinks of Mr. Fell’s fork, one table over. “Are you all right, Saida?”

“I’m afraid—” Saida twisted her hands together. “I do not know what I did to him. Or  _ how.” _

_ “You _ didn’t,” Ravi and Paul said almost simultaneously.

“Then  _ what happened?” _ It came out louder than Ravi thought she meant it to.

“Er,” Paul said. “Er, obviously—obviously—”

“Listen,” Ravi said, after an instant’s frantic thought, “the arsehole was obviously unstable, wasn’t he? Attacking people on the street. Chasing them into a  _ café, _ where there’s half a dozen people to give his face to the police, I mean, who does that? A mad person. He just happened to go the rest of the way around the twist.”

“I do not think it works like that,” Saida said.

Ravi was absolutely certain it didn’t work like that, and he suspected he was doing mad people something of a disservice. “What else could it be? He had a breakdown. That’s all.”

Saida looked at him.

And then at the table, scattered over with Dungeons and Dragons books. Including, directly in front of Ravi, the Monster Manual, which had a very clear picture of a beholder on the front. An  _ eyeball _ monster—had Saida been there for that bit of dialogue? Had the man’s screaming been loud enough to be heard in the loo? Ravi thought maybe it had.

The weirdly shaped dice probably weren’t helping, either. Ravi’s were black with purple iridescence.

“Actually,” Saida said in a rush, “please do not buy me tea, I have to be at work. Thank you very much for your help—”

“You’re sure?” Birch said. They already had their wallet out.

“Yes, thank you very much, but I am afraid I am going to be  _ late, _ I am sorry. Good-bye!”

She wasn’t  _ quite _ running when she hit the front door of the cafe, but it was close.

“Well,” Lorinda said, “that was a hell of a thing.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Paul suggested.

“Been a while since I saw someone freak out like that over Dungeons and Dragons,” Daisy mused. “Usually it’s the gay thing. I thought we were generations past the whole Satanism scare.”

Ravi tilted the Monster Manual towards them. “I think it was just the illustration,” he said. “If a beholder doesn’t have ‘too many eyes,’ what does?” He realized an instant after he said it that it might not be a rhetorical question.

“Let’s  _ not talk about it.” _

They studiously didn’t talk about it until Mr. Fell cleaned his plate and drastically overtipped and went out the door. Then Birch said, “You guys don’t think—”

“I  _ absolutely _ think,” Paul said, “and I also think it’s  _ none of our business.” _

They didn’t talk about it at all until Ravi found Birch crying in the library five days later. “Hey,” he said, and then, because they didn’t respond, “hey. Look at me. I’ll help. Whatever it is, I’ll help. Talk to me, Birch.”

If it sounded a little more tender than it should have, that was probably finals stress.

“Laptop,” Birch gulped.

Oh, no. “What happened?”

“Coffee.”

Oh,  _ no. _ “Is that all your work?” Maybe they could use a data retrieval service? With some money they got somewhere?

“Seven days,” Birch said. At Ravi’s surprised look, “I backed it up on a hard drive, I’m not  _ thick, _ just careless. But that’s  _ seven days _ of writing, and—and sources.”

“We can find the sources,” Ravi said. “Come on.”

Finding the sources in the library was just time-consuming. Finding the source that was outside the library might be more difficult. “This one,” Birch said, “is the book from Fell’s.”

Ravi took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ll go there. Tomorrow, when it’s open.”

“Right, so first of all, the odds of that are maybe one in twenty, and secondly—” They stopped.

“Yeah,” Ravi agreed.

“It’s  _ stupid, _ I know it’s stupid. I wouldn’t be afraid of someone who punched a Nazi, that doesn’t mean they’re going to punch me. But somehow when it’s weird unspecified psychic powers—do you think he reads people’s minds?”

Ravi decided not to pass on his own speculations about true forms. “If he does,” he said, “he’s plainly fine with all of us knowing, because you know we were  _ all _ thinking it. After. Listen, he hasn’t hurt you this far, so he’s not going to hurt you now. We’ll go tomorrow.”

Birch slid their laptop back into their bag. “Yeah. Tomorrow,” they said, in the tones of someone sentenced to walk the plank.

The next day, Ravi took Birch to Fell’s. He wasn’t sure which one of them was more jittery.

They had to stake out the place for a while before it opened. Birch expressed a worry—or possibly a hope—that it wouldn’t open at all that day. Ravi insisted on waiting.

At length, the sign was flipped to OPEN. Ravi hadn’t seen Mr. Fell do it, and he tried not to speculate too hard about that. “Come on.”

Birch swallowed and went with him.

Inside, the bookshop was doing its best to hold more books than space actually permitted. It also smelled, a musty smell that didn’t bode well for the preservation of any of the tomes here. Or maybe the smell came from—something else. A nonhuman being with a lot of eyes . . .

“Birch!” Ravi wasn’t sure where Mr. Fell had appeared from, but he was there. “And you brought your friend!”

“Um, yeah, hi, I’m Ravi,” Ravi said.

Mr. Fell  _ looked _ completely human. If it was an illusion, why hadn’t he thought to update it over the years? Maybe he didn’t realize people might notice? Or maybe he didn’t care? Or maybe it took a lot of work to develop an illusion that didn’t give people uncanny valley chills, and once an entity found one, they stuck with it? That fit with the antique clothes.

“So lovely to meet you, Ravi,” Mr. Fell said, and he sounded sincere. “What brings you out here today?”

“Honestly,” Ravi said, not quite honestly, “I’m looking after Birch. Their laptop is broken, and they’re going to have to redo a week’s work, which includes a book from your shop. Stressful, especially since it’s the end of the semester.”

“Is it already?” It was a rhetorical question. “What happened to the laptop?”

“Coffee,” Birch said in a low voice.

“Do you have it with you?”

Birch blinked. “Um, yeah, in my bag.” They had, Ravi thought, stuck it in there more out of habit than anything else.

“Give it here for a moment or so. It’s possible that all it needs is a good cleaning. Much easier than redoing your research.” The smile that accompanied this was a little bit fixed and artificial, and it gave Ravi the creeps. Whatever Mr. Fell meant to do with the computer, it wasn’t a good cleaning.[1]

Maybe he was an alien. An alien would find human technology to be child’s play, wouldn’t he?

Birch produced the computer and handed it to Mr. Fell.

“Wait here a moment,” Mr. Fell said, and took the laptop into the back room.

“Don’t touch anything,” Birch said to Ravi in a low voice.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ravi said, sincerely.

The musty smell was entirely gone. Had it vanished when Mr. Fell realized that they weren’t strangers, or had it vanished when he was distracted with the problem of the computer? Ravi wasn’t sure. He pulled out his phone in lieu of looking at any of the books.

Birch jittered.

At length, Mr. Fell brought the computer back, and laid it on the table. “Try it and see if it works now,” he urged.

Birch opened the machine and pressed the relevant button. There was a breath-holding pause. Mr. Fell looked sternly at the machine and it started up, displaying the usual image warning that there was an intel inside it.

“You did it!” Birch whooped, and then—it was the stress of finals, Ravi thought, they would never have risked it if they’d been thinking straight—threw their arms around Mr. Fell.

Mr. Fell jerked backwards, pulling away, and Birch let go instantly. “I’m—I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have. Shouldn’t have done that. Um. Please don’t be cross?”

“No harm done,” Mr. Fell assured him, straightening all his clothes, whether they needed straightening or not. He looked and sounded exactly like a person who had been startled and discomfited by an affectionate gesture. “I’m glad I was of some assistance. Would you and your young man like some tea?”

“He’s—he’s not my young man,” Birch managed. “He’s with Paul. A friend.”

“Well, yes, but—” Mr. Fell dropped into that incomprehensible dialect again. Polari.

Birch blinked. And then said, sounding small and vulnerable, “You really think so?”

“How could I know? But I think you’ll regret it if you don’t at least ask,” Mr. Fell said.

“I—yeah. I’ll do that.” Birch looked sideways at Ravi, then picked up the laptop. “I’m pretty sure we need to be getting back. It’s finals time, you know how it is—”

“Of course, of course. Do drop in any time.”

Ravi waited until they were back on the bus to the university before he started thinking about how to ask. Birch beat him to it, taking several deep breaths, and then saying, in a rush, “Look, the thing is that I’d really like to date you and Paul if you were up for it and Mr. Fell thinks I should tell you so I’m telling you.”

Ravi blinked for a moment.

Birch didn't wait for him to collect his thoughts. He grimaced and looked away. “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, I knew it would make it all weird. Elder whatever, it doesn’t mean he knows—”

“He might,” Ravi said.

“What?”

“Know. That I’m—listen, I have to ask Paul. It doesn’t go ahead without Paul. I don’t break trusts. But we never actually talked about it, you understand?”

“About whether you were poly or not?”

“Yeah. Probably a pretty serious omission,” Ravi admitted. “No, the point is—you’re—I mean, I would go for it. With you. I like you a lot.” Did he sound as inarticulate to Birch as he did to himself?

“Oh.” To be fair, Birch wasn’t spouting Shakespeare himself. “How long—”

“I don’t  _ know, _ do I? These things sneak up on me.” Ravi took a deep breath. “Birch?”

“Yeah?”

“When you hugged Mr. Fell, did it feel like—I don’t know, like—”

“A person?” Birch completed.

Ravi let his breath out. “You’ve been thinking about it too.”

_ “Too many fucking eyes, _ it was just a bit difficult not to notice that bit, innit? Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been trying  _ not _ to think about it. Not like it’s any of  _ my _ business if someone wants to have a true form. But I keep thinking of, you know that experiment, with the bees? Someone puts a fake bee on a stick, and moves it around to get something, and sees if the real bee will imitate it? I’ve been wondering if the human bit is sort of a fake bee on a stick.”

“Yeah.” And wasn’t  _ that _ an image that didn’t go well with sweet and uninterrupted sleep.

“But the thing is, I don’t see that it  _ matters. _ Person has a true form, person has an uncomfortable number of eyeballs maybe, that signifies a lot less than the person being a person. And I think he is.”

Ravi thought about it. “You’re saying Lovecraft can eat a bag of dicks.”

“Yeah. Lovecraft can eat a bag of dicks, and cosmic horror can take a running jump. Eldritch entities one hundred percent welcome so long as they’re gentle with the humans and wipe whatever they use for feet.” Birch was quiet for a moment. “Also, he felt just like a person.”

“And he was right about you asking me,” Ravi noted.

“You think he read your mind?”

“If he did,” Ravi said, “he at least focused on the bits where I like people and not the stuff I don’t like about myself. So that’s—not something I’m comfortable with, but not  _ malicious. _ And besides, I’m not sure he had to. It might be an aura thing, where I broadcast stuff, or maybe he was listening to us play D&D. Or it might just be that he thinks people should take a chance when we can because it’ll all be over in a few years. From his perspective.”

“Yeah.”

They rode back to the university, and Ravi called Paul.

The resultant conversation involved a lot of painstaking negotiation, but at the end of it, they had all three started dating—at literally the worst possible time in the semester, and their spectators, Daisy and Lorinda, were in the end somewhat awed that they made it through finals without a spectacular breakup or three. Ravi wasn’t sure exactly how they had managed it himself.

He also wasn’t sure who or what he owed the new relationship to. But there were some questions, he decided, that one shouldn’t ask—not because man was not meant to know the answers, but because it was  _ rude. _

Besides, if he asked, he might have to explain Paul’s gem dragon theory.

* * *

1 Ravi was, in fact, entirely wrong about the last point. Normally, being soaped, rinsed thoroughly, and dried would not have brought a computer back from the dead. Quite the opposite. But a nice bracing talk and a small miracle go a long ways.  [ return to text ]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The Lair of an Elder Gay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23311966) by [semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperfiona/pseuds/semperfiona_podfic)




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